Butterfly
by Prince Nightingale
Summary: Emily...what was it like to die?"


**Disclaimer: Corpse Bride is the property of Tim Burton, etc. I do not own anything featured in the film. I'm merely borrowing :) **

Emily. Every night she'd etch her name into the dirt as she sat on the bench on the cliff overlooking the underworld. She watched the pirouettes of her own long, bony finger as it flew to a dying twirl at the end of the Y. She looked down and squinted; the sight of elegant twirls, obscured by her own shapely, moon-blue shin in the foreground made her feel beautiful still. It was a reminder that she was Emily, and Emily was a beautiful thing; Emily was still around to write her name like the whimsical youth she was.

Squinting, she was spared sight of the moldy holes where death had nibbled her leg. It all just melted into a shiny, waxy blue. She thought about her skin; soft and cold. Maggots were slowly unpicking her like stitches in a ragdoll, leaving lacerations where Death had taken a long lick with its surreptitious tongue. The lips of each welt curled into something black and hateful. In life she had been loved; loved for her beauty, good nature and gentle whim. But death…death hated her.

She turned swiftly to see Victor, bright and flushed and rabbit-eyed.

"I'm sorry!" He blurted out. "I have disturbed you – "

"Sit with me, Victor." She requested quietly. He scuttled tentatively to her side, folding himself accordingly on the bench like a napkin. His scrambling little body was a slim, white fruit, barely ripe and packed with sweet, supple muscle and plush, pale pink organs and a huge, dithering heart.

"I'm sorry I…I don't know what I can offer you."

"You can breathe, can't you?" She craned her neck to look up at the sky, and Victor watched as the flesh there cracked like wax. She didn't flinch at the sound. "Your breath's amazing, Victor. I felt it from 10 feet away."

"You can feel my breath?"

Her eyes flew shut and her hard plum lips slid into a fleeting smile. "It's all over me. It's beautiful. It's like…butter. Hot Butter." She giggled. "Hot Butter in winter time. Father used to say it was like a dripping lump of miracle."

Victor blinked. "Your….father?"

Emily blinked rapidly. "Well yes." She bubbled up with indignation. "I…I wasn't always just some…sad old corpse in a wedding dress you know!"

Victor's eyes cowered in their sockets; this was a monstrously wronged creature. Emily caught his look of alarm and composed herself.

"I know what you think of me, Victor. Most of the time I feel the same." A pretty little slice of the earth's regurgitated filth. A clattering puppet raging towards him. A bride, and nothing more.

She sighed and hung back against the bench. "Just look at that sky." She murmured. "Such dead air. You'll never find another honest place." The sky hung thickly, like a mass of powder had been cast into the air and paralyzed before it hit the ground.

"Emily…What was it like to die?"

The blue lady glanced at Victor. She stared at the smiles batting off the moisture in those big, blaring bright eyes. What _had_ it been like?

She knew the Now. The cackling bones and the brutal angularity of every tangy alcove that, as the night progressed, always wound up dissolved in ashen laughs and piquant pina colada .The hollow-eyed grins, the salty colors that mauled you like a lapdog, the subdued smirk of the outside city with its smarmy, slithering gates and silver wood that cracked lazy smiles where feasting woodworm had ravaged. The spiky brooms, the cakey cold flesh worn like a spray of jewels, the smoky jazz with its stream of dismal appreciation. The long, grim, communal hug with ash and insects and desecration. It was a grim celebration.

As for the Then…it fluttered out of her sometimes like a few fickle butterflies. But as soon as she tried to catch them they were gone, like the remnants of a pale dream. Then, with all of such delicate thoughts, she wondered if they were ever even there.

But up here on the hill, where the night was not soaked in neon swamp liquor, she could remember.

She remembered her porcelain doll skidding over the marble floor. Silver light plummeting from the huge bay windows into flecky white puddles, the smashed light clotting around the peach dome of the doll's head. The doll's black glass eyes staring blankly into the serene oblivion, her burgundy party dress crinkled like a wrapper, the white winter sun slithering through her upturned lace petticoat like needles.

She remembered crushing green grime into her little nails as she stubbed together a daisy chain for her dusty-haired, rusty-eyed boy cousin. He pierced her with a sparkly almond eye and tore it with his golden fists. Sullied, squeezed, scrawny daisies stippled across the ground amongst the living ones.

She remembered the varnish of the piano, sinking tentative little fingers down on the blunt, condemning keys; the feathery hair of her bespectacled teacher that caught the light like a sticky, elegant web.

She remembered dank autumn nights, curled on the rug in the living room, staring deep into the lapping amber folds of the fire, hoping to see somewhere in its depthless mass, a tiny golden fortress, behind which tiny sinners burned.

She remembered lining her aunt's vintage collection of rings all along the vanity faire, while the antique gemstones smiled knowingly at her peachy, excitable 15 year old face from their dreary collets.

And she remembered a satin black voice wrapping her up, and a stone chest wielding her lithe body like a kite tethered in the wind; grey, rubber lips ghosting over her neck in the courtyard one heavy black night.

She remembered seizing hungry handfuls of her mother's pearls, upon their liberation from the ebony box, the beam of the moon licking them moist again; silky and small in their hundreds swimming and giggling in her white palms. She remembered how the door flung open furiously and the wind hit her like a percussion of dread, her thunderous gallop through the town, over the bridge, the forest flying at her and the crows and darkness roaring as she was swallowed. The scrawny, brittle branches and the rasping wind clawing her, trying to tear her perfectly parceled, warm little body into tendrils; string her throughout the forest.

But she remained compact and ardent. Her fat scarlet heart was thumping beautifully, singing, sawing. Her muscles danced like a thrash of guitar strings, thumping and wailing beneath her fiery flesh. A branch ripped her hair free and it raged back, pummeling into the night. Tears streamed down her face and rolled over her red, ravenous mouth. _Soon, Barkis my darling, soon…. _She was a sweet, vigorous young fruit, all parceled and garnished in a flurry of frothy white silk, and she wanted nothing more than to plunge into his arms and be gobbled lustily. Crunch, like summer's bright virgin apple; beat red.

She halted abruptly, hot with love. This was the tree. She blanched; it was tall and bent and condemning and stark, like the fierce, falcon-eyed Pastor Galswells. There were no arms to crash into; her halt had been a graceless skid. A clot of mud and cold, slimy leaves mulched over her pumps.

And then she had to confront the silence, nicked by insidious little chirps. And then her pants of exhaustion shuddered out the last of the heat, and the cold crept up on her, and she shivered. And every shiver shook out tiny trickles of passion from each pumping pink pore, as a minute passed and there was no Barkis.

The string of pearls slid beneath her dress, eliciting a series of tiny titters. A crow wounded the silence with an abrupt "CWAAARRRK", and she jumped, swan-like neck wielding her bedraggled spectacle of a head from side to side in fear.

Time passed and she stood through it, her gilded chest thrust faithfully at the moon, which wrenched her captured, hopeful heart in place. She held her hope and fidelity to the moon like wine in a goblet held up for a toast. To Emily, and her delicate, pretty little life.

Something rustled; she twitched; she put a cool finger to her warm lips, and tasted mango sweetness – bitter cold. Another, more violent rustle, and she turned.

--

"Emily?" Victor hovered tentatively at her side, peering over with concern. "Emily are you…are you alright?"

She blinked and awoke from her stupor, finding herself staring endlessly into the stagnant party powder of the sky.

"You asked me what it was like to die…."

"Forgive me." He uttered quickly. "It was an insensitive question…"

"I remember being alive…turning, seeing him there, towering over me. He was different. He was the devil; I saw it in his eyes, this…._lightening_….and my stomach plunged. This huge, long, cold plunge that went right down through my dress. His hands came for me and I screamed… and I remember it filling my whole chest and throat and mouth. I remember feeling his muscles pulse, hot and powerful, crashing down on me..." Her skeletal fingers ghosted over her arm, tracing phantoms.

"Emily…Emily I –"

Emily ignored him, standing briskly, her scrunched wedding veil toppling to the floor, curtaining her womanly figure. The shapeless white creature now wafted vacantly towards the edge, and Victor momentarily wondered if he'd lost her. But then her musical voice began again, low and unfathomable.

"And I remember being dead… When I opened my eyes, there were faces and color and noise. I didn't understand what had happened. But with all the grins, the music, and the laughter there was… _life_, I thought." She laughed despondently. "They told me I was dead as dust, swept me up and slumped me over the bar. They laughed and made me a drink.

She turned to look at Victor with an incredulous look, lips delicately parted.

"…I opened my mouth, something on my tongue…but what was it? I lost it. Christ, what do you say when you open your eyes and you're _dead_?" Her mouth snapped shut and she resumed her aimless stare at the horizon. "So I just laughed along with them. Some hideous cackle that probably didn't exist in me before. They told me it wasn't so bad and the music started all over again. They were dancing and singing and parading around like there was something to celebrate, and I didn't understand but I pretended to. Something inside me was begging me to endorse this mindless farce. It told me, be monstrous and vengeful and strong. A brilliant, beautiful princess of the underworld. It told me that it was absolutely, unequivocally important that I FIND LOVE. That I hunt it down and _ensnare_ it, secure it as MINE and never, NEVER let it go. And I vowed to. Somewhere amongst my drunken screeches that night, I screeched for love, out of… anger, maybe. Desperation, more likely. Funny, I barely remember now."

She wandered back to the bench collapsed on it, running her fingers through her hair.

"There's this _gap_, Victor, this horrible black canyon gouged into my life. I was living, and then I was dead. I was there, and then I was here. I had a family, admirers, so many things, beautiful, _wonderful_ things…and then it was gone. God knows they explained it to me a million times, but still wonder, what happened to me that night? What does it mean…to die?"

Victor swallowed. "I think death…is something very sad. You lost your life. And I'm sorry for that loss, Emily."

Emily turned sharply and gave Victor a long, curious gaze. "No one ever said that to me." Victor looked to the floor. He stared at his small, beetle black shoes, and her broken white wedding slippers, and listened to her wobbly breathing. "You know, on clear days like this, I've sometimes wondered what happened when I died. What my mother wore to my funeral; if my death made my parents hold each other like they used to…or if it just drew them further apart." A small smile twinkled in the corner of her mouth. "On my wicked days I wonder how many tears were cried for me, how long people grieved…"

"Did _you_ ever grieve?" The smile died on Emily's face, and Victor felt he should have regretted the question, but couldn't.

She shook her head. "I was laughing…" Her voice split into a series of exasperated laughs. "I was too busy laughing. Laughing like a little rotting fool." The gasping ceased. Victor's eyes climbed the porcelain sky in the silence. A feeling of loneliness began to slowly settle on the couple, and the further his eyes climbed, the lonelier he felt, and the lonelier he felt for her.

Then, from her coiled state of silence, Emily threw her head back and let out a huge sob. It echoed through the endless night. She toppled like a tower onto Victor, who slid an arm around her. They stayed there, dismal but content, awaiting no sunrise, and no sunset.

**I've decided this is done, mainly because I'm tired and bed eagerly awaits. PLEASE review; I would love to know what you guys think; I've never written Corpse Bride Fanfiction before, and would greatly appreciate any tips. Thanks for reading :) **


End file.
